BEYOND THE FLOWERPOTS
Greg Bruce talks to Anne Geddes about her evolution from baby photographer to ‘so much more’
Greg Bruce talks to Anne Geddes about her evolution from baby photographer to ‘so much more’
It was New Year’s Eve in Sydney, 1984. Anne Geddes, husband Kel, their baby Stephanie and a group of friends had just been out watching the early fireworks display on Sydney harbour.
The group were walking home along the waterfront, they’d had some wine, they were talking about their plans for the year ahead and making New Year’s resolutions, and the Sydney night was no doubt warm and full of possibility when Geddes said she wanted to be the best-known baby photographer in the world.
It seems, in retrospect, like an especially bold pronouncement from someone who had been given her first camera only two years earlier, and who was still several years away from even having her first photographic studio.
Except for the fact it came true, it might easily have been one of those dreamy things we all say at one point or another — some grand dream that pops into our head, then drifts slowly away as real life takes over.
“I don’t know why I said it,” Geddes says now. “I remember the words coming out of my mouth and I was like, ‘Ooh, who said that?’”
One way of looking at life is as a series of moments that only gain real significance when we look back at them and see how they fitted with what came later. You could call them snapshots.
GEDDES, 60, has just released a new book, Small World, which is made up of some of the best-known images from her career as the world’s best-known baby photographer. There’s the one of the twins sitting in cabbages, there’s the dozens of babies in flowerpots, there’s the tiny premature baby entirely contained in a man’s hands, and many, many others.
Concurrently, while working on the book, Geddes also been running a series on Facebook and Instagram, titled “Baby, Look At You Now” in which she’s been displaying some of her best-known images alongside shots of their subjects today, as adults, along with a few sentences about what they’re doing with their lives. Time stays still; time moves on.
The former babies are now graduates in communication studies, they’re early childhood teachers, they’re builders, they’re workers in aged care homes. One of them was a member of the Black Ferns team that won the silver medal in rugby sevens at last year’s Rio Olympics; a pair of twins have gone on to international dance fame.
IT WAS the early 1960s, and a hot day at the Queensland cattle station where she lived, when a 7 or 8-year-old Geddes told her mother, “There’s something that I need to do, but I don’t know what it is.”
At the time, Geddes was playing barefoot on the prickly grass while her mother hung the washing out. “Go ride your bike,” her mother said. “No, that’s not what I meant,” Geddes replied. What did she mean? She says now that she didn’t really know, nor does she know why she said it. All she knew was that she felt a pull, and she didn’t have any idea where the pull was taking her.
Every newborn baby to me represents the human race’s opportunity to regenerate, our chance at new beginnings, and it’s an eternal chance every time a baby is born. Anne Geddes
IT WAS 1988, and Anne Geddes was standing at the counter of a dairy in Newmarket, Auckland, with a copy of More magazine.
She flipped through the pages, searching for something, and then there it was: her first published photograph; a full-page shot of a baby wearing a tutu, which she had taken in Melbourne the year before.
“Look!” she said, showing the magazine to the shopkeeper, whom she suspects didn’t speak much English. “This is my image!” He didn’t react.
Geddes had moved to New Zealand earlier that year, after her husband got a job as TV3’s first programming chief. Because TV3 was quite a big deal at the time, the media took an interest in its leading people and what they and their families were doing. That’s how she ended up in More magazine.
After the image was published, she went back to her tiny studio in Newmarket’s George St, “and then my phone started ringing off the hook”.
IT WAS 1996, and Oprah Winfrey, on her eponymous, now-defunct television show, held up Geddes’ first book, Down in the Garden and told viewers and the studio audience: “This is the best coffee table book I’ve ever seen.” The book went directly on to the New York
Times best-seller list, making Geddes, almost overnight, if not the best-known baby photographer in the world, then at least the one most lauded by Winfrey, which is basically the same thing.
Asked if that was the moment that launched her, Geddes says, “Oh definitely. I would say so.” But, with a little bit of space and time, she reconsiders that position. Her first calendar in New Zealand in 1992 had been commercially successful and so had the greeting card range she launched around the same time, so even if she hadn’t appeared on
Oprah, there was a good chance her book would have been a success.
“But she certainly helped.”
GEDDES, WHO now lives in New York, is now wealthy and influential, and those facts combined have allowed her to spend much more of her time on the cause-related work that now occupies so much of her attention.
She shoots for, and helps promote, diverse causes such as March of Dimes, which works to end premature birth and infant mortality, and the United Nations’ Shot@Life programme, which
takes vaccines to developing countries, and she has taken an incredible series of images aimed at raising awareness, and encouraging prevention, of meningitis.
The world feels a bit bleak lately: war, hate, division, so many angry tweets — but that doesn’t mean it will always be like that. This is the message of her new book, and of her work as a whole: There is always hope.
“Every newborn baby to me represents the human race’s opportunity to regenerate, our chance at new beginnings,” Geddes says, “and it’s an eternal chance every time a baby is born.”
THE FULFILMENT of the goal she stated on the Sydney waterfront on New Year’s Eve 1984 probably came to fruition the day she went on
Oprah, or at least in the days and years following, but the goal-setter had moved on —or at least she did eventually.
“I don’t think I’d even say that now, that I’m the best-known children’s photographer in the world,” Geddes says, “I would never say that about myself. I think it just was something silly that I said on a New Year’s Eve, but within me it was more about developing my craft in that regard, to be able to create these beautiful, timeless images. For instance, all of those early portraits, it was more about that as opposed to financial success or anything — it was more in terms of my creativity.”
When she first told her mother, in the 1960s, that there was something she needed to do, she didn’t have any idea what it was. When she first picked up he husband’s Pentax K1000 in Hong Kong in the early 1980s, she still didn’t have any idea. When she started experimenting with taking photos of the babies of friends and neighbours around the same time, maybe the idea was starting to form, but it’s impossible to know for sure now when it really took root.
When we look back at the past, we often apply a filter of meaningfulness, as if the moments of our lives had led us inevitably to where we are, but the reality is generally much more random.
“I STUMBLED around for a couple of years, trying to find my own style,” Geddes says, “and that’s what I say to new photographers who ask me for advice: ‘You’ve got to slip into your own way of doing things, your own way of seeing things, and your own way of feeling your images. It can’t be anybody else’s and until you find that, you’ll struggle.’”
Her style, as traceable through her new retrospective, is not easily defined. There’s the highly stylised, props-heavy early work with which she made her name and that still defines her in the public eye, whether she likes it or not. But there are also the frank portraits, the pregnant nudes, the shots of people ravaged by disease, the advocacy work.
“I get a bit frustrated, because I say to Kel and anyone who will listen, ‘Have I got a flowerpot tattooed on my forehead?’ Because people always go, ‘Oh, the flowerpots!’
“‘Yeah, yeah, I know,’” she replies to them in her imagination, “‘but there’s so much more.’”
It is a curse to be reduced to your most famous moment, but it’s also a blessing.
When she was looking back over her archive, selecting images for the new book, Geddes says she was able to recognise how each step in her career led to each new step in her career, which got her to the point she is at now, as someone who can pretty much do what she wants.
“Everything led to something else,” she says, “and the road was not always straight.”
I get a bit frustrated, because I say to Kel and anyone who will listen, ‘Have I got a flowerpot tattooed on my forehead?’ Because people always go, ‘Oh, the flowerpots!’ Anne Geddes